Midterm for AMD 317
My midterm project is based around a source photograph of my mother (below) when she was just 21 years old and had recently begun a serious relationship with my dad. My family rediscovered this photo when we were salvaging old pictures from a recent house flood. The image is badly water damaged, so I was able to digitize and restore it for my mother as part of this project.
The source image marks a tipping point in my mother’s life when she was transitioning from an intelligent girl to a mature woman starting her own family. My sisters and I are going through a very similar period of our lives right now with my eldest sister, Sydney, moving out of the family home and my twin, Julia, and I starting our higher education and professional careers. So, I decided to take portraits of each of us daughters to memorialize our transition into adulthood and digitally paint each of our future dreams on them. This project documents this monumental change in our personal and family life while comparing it to my mother’s previous experiences.
Each portrait is in a domestic setting and in black and white like the source photo. The lighting is brightest on the face to highlight each of our expressions and attractively contour our faces. Each composition is a bit different to communicate our individual feelings about our future lives. Sydney, in the first photo, is the most centered to show her teetering position between childhood and adulthood. She is fully facing the left to show her readiness to move forward into the future and all the beautiful events to come shown in the drawings. However, there is a large space to the right of her which shows her love and connection to her current family that she still has. Julia, in the second photo, is also about centered in the composition, but looks back over her shoulder to show how she is still engrossed in the present and past despite being excited about the future. In the last photo, I am positioned fully on the right side of the composition to show that I am the most comfortable in the present. I look directly forward to all my future dreams, but am still comfortable with my current life. Each of the photos were taken with my digital camera, edited in Lightroom, and illustrated with Adobe Photoshop Draw. My mother’s photo was painstakingly restored in Photoshop and edited in Lightroom.
As for the drawings, I chose to do them on my iPad because digital drawing is the next jump I am taking in my artistic exploration along with transitioning to adulthood. Sydney’s illustrations are done in yellow to show her bright readiness for the future, but also caution about moving ahead. Orange represents bold moves towards future goals on Julia’s portrait, but the vibrancy of the color shows her slight naivety. My illustration’s pink color shows that I am the most caught in the past and childish of us daughters. It also shows comfortable joy when looking towards my future dreams. All together they make a lovely color palette that shows our overall joyful readiness for the future. Each of the illustrations show our future goals like starting our own families, having successful careers, traveling, owning houses, and finding love. Julia’s also shows her dream of being awarded a patent and going on surf trips. Mine shows my goals of having my own art studio, being in more art shows, and painting a mural. Illustrations on Sydney’s show her goals to learn to play the electric guitar and find a good church for her family one day.
Overall, my whole family got a unique chance to reflect on our current, future, and past lives through this project. I got to have some really nice conversations with my sisters and mother about our future dreams and even our worries. My mother was especially overjoyed to have me create this project and document the transition into womanhood of her three daughters.
Shelby Rossman's Digital Photo Blog 